Patent attributes
Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer program products, for regulating access of consumers (e.g., applications, containers, or VMs) to resources and services (e.g., storage). In one embodiment, this regulation occurs through the use of access or action permits, referred to as permits that the consumer acquires from an intermediate entity—an Action Manager (AM)—prior to accessing the resource or service. Regulating access includes, for example, controlling one or more of the number of concurrent accesses to a particular resource, the rate at which consumers access the resource, the total number of consumers in a group of consumers accessing the resource, and the total rate at which a group of consumers accesses a resource. According to various embodiments, similar regulation is applied to a group of resources (rather than a single resource).